Under the Hood of .NET Memory Management - Simple Talk

Chapter 4: Common Memory Problems
Assert.AreEqual(2, sizeof(Char));
Assert.AreEqual(1, Marshal.SizeOf(new Char()));
Listing 4.15: Comparing the sizes of chars in managed and unmanaged code.
Overflow checking
The .NET framework can do automatic arithmetic overflow checking to ensure that
calculations are not corrupted by overflowing the values in the underlying type system. By
default this is disabled in C#. Ironically, this is enabled by default for a VB.NET project,
but there is little risk from disabling it in most cases. As you will see below, the right set of
conditions have to be met to even have a risk of an overflow.
Figure 4.2: You can explicitly enable/disable overflow checking.
The maximum value of System.Int32 is 2,147,483,647. What is the value when you add
Int32.MaxValue to itself? Well, the compiler is smart enough to throw a compile-time
error: The operation overflows at compile time in checked mode. Of course, the compiler can
easily be confused. Let's add a method (see Listing 4.16).
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